In certain situations of everyday life, certificates of association with a place are requested from individuals in order to prove that they do indeed reside or work in a particular place.
This can in particular be the case in administrative procedures, where the issuing of certain documents requires such proof, or when there is a request to access certain services, the supply of which depends on the individual's place of residence.
These residence certificates were initially obtained in paper form, based on paper documents supplied to the address of the place in question by a third party having a well established reputation. Thus, for example, paper telephone bills or bills from a supplier of an energy resource supplying the individual's premises may be thought of.
However, with the arrival of the digital age, it has proved more practical to produce such certificates in digital form, which can be handled more easily and can be encrypted if necessary, rather than in paper form.
An example of a method for obtaining such a digital residence certificate is thus described in French patent application FR 08 52 059. In the system described in that application, by anchoring a certifying device to a meter, itself anchored in a residence, it is possible to obtain digital residence certificates having a certain degree of reliability.
However, such a system has certain drawbacks.
Thus, this type of digital certificate depends entirely on the presence of an energy flow meter in the individual's residence, which makes this solution rather inflexible and does not allow the delivery of digital residence certificates for residences that do not have such a meter, or the delivery of digital certificates relating to geographical places other than a residence, for example relating to an office or to business premises.
Moreover, the use of this certification system remains strictly local, which limits the services that can be obtained with this type of digital certificate.